Françoise Girard is the President of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC). She recently concluded a six-year tenure as the Director of the Public Health Program at Open Society Foundations (OSF). Françoise also was Regional Director for Southern Central and Eastern Europe and Haiti at OSF in the 1990s. From 1999 to 2003, she was Senior Program Officer for International Policy at IWHC. She has played a key role in advocacy in UN agencies and UN Conferences such as ICPD+5, Beijing+5, Special Session on HIV/AIDS and on Children, ICPD+10, and the 2005 World Summit on the MDGs. She currently serves as Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and was the Chair of the Leadership Programme Committee of the 2010 International AIDS Conference, a 20,000+ participant biannual scientific conference. She has contributed many articles to peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Health and Human Rights, and International Family Planning Perspectives; and her other writings include “Negotiating Sexual Rights and Sexual Orientation at the United Nations,” in SexPolitics: the Front Lines, 2007; and “Advocacy for Sexuality and Women’s Rights: Continuities, Discontinuities and Strategies since ICPD” in Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, 2009. Françoise holds an M.A. in Political Science from McGill University and an LL.B. from the Université de Montréal, and she was a law clerk to Justice Charles Gonthier of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Though abortion is legal in Kenya in certain circumstances, many women and health-care providers remain misinformed about the law—and some corrupt police forces are reportedly taking advantage of this confusion.

Peru has more reported cases of rape and sexual violence than any other country in South America. Eight in ten of these victims are minors. Women and girls in this situation are faced with two options: seek an illegal abortion and risk going to jail or carry the pregnancy to term.

For those of us trying to discern whether the rights of women will truly be at the center of this Family Planning Initiative, as promised by DFID and the Gates Foundation in response to our months of advocacy, there were moments of disquiet.